“We simply sent invitations to our colleagues from across Europe asking them to take their data and enter them into a single database.
“The thing is that many botanists and plant ecologists across Europe collect data on species composition of flora in specific locations and many of these observations are repeated in time on the same location.
“They are usually used for analysis of species change in a small region, maybe in a specific habitat like in a single forest or single grassland, but they have never been…